‘Art cannot be used to indoctrinate’

It is more about appreciation, says Sri Lankan documentary filmmaker:

S. Aishwarya

TIRUCHI: He strongly believes that the impact of theatre would be effective enough to spread the spirit of anti-war amongst people. “Sri Lanka would get back its serenity very soon,” says Dharmasiri Bhandaranayake, one among the many Sinhala filmmakers, who voice their protests through stages and screens.

Amidst the rumblings of war in the country, his is a hopeful voice of peace. Sri Lanka would have been a serene multicultural country, but for the ethnic strife, he says, Despite two murder attempts on him, his films and documentaries don’t seem to end their criticisms of the ongoing war. When his film career, wherein he started as an actor, was on the upswing, he quit film making and took to documentaries to cover the horror of war.

His maiden documentary ‘Echoes of War,’ made in 1987, earned him quite a number of admirers. “It talked about the dilapidating cultural monuments, one of the casualties of incessant war. We forget to protect the nation in an urge to protect the races,” he says.

The country, he observes, has been fast losing the coherence of its multicultural history. His six set of documentaries are seen as an attempt to reconnect the lost dimensions of the culture shared by the Tamil and Sinhalese.

Even as a host of his documentaries including ‘Kooththu,’ ‘Vadda Kalari,’ ‘Ravanasen’ and ‘Drums of Sri Lanka’ rocked the country portraying the in-depth cultural similarity between the Sinhalese and Tamils. Bandaranayake came up with a play that was screened over three times in LTTE dominated areas, making him the only Sinhalese director to screen his works in that part of the country in the last 30 years.

‘The Trojan Women,’ the Greek play, originally written by Euripides, was tailored to portray the desolations of the innocent victims, especially women and children. It was screened across the globe, with translations in English and Tamil.

While majority of the artistes use theatre as a platform to voice their protest against war, the pro-war groups who have been using arts as a propaganda medium begun to retreat.

“They understood how inadequate it was to use theatre and music as a medium to propagate war. Art is more about appreciation and cannot be used as a medium to indoctrinate,” says Bhandaranayake who was on a cultural tour to South India recently.

Expressing concern over the destructions caused by the war, he says that the situation has only worsened down the years. “We saw no improvement even during the ceasefire period.

Now the displacement has reached tragic proportions. Cultural interventions through theatres and street plays are oppressed ruthlessly,” he says.

The Hindu